With respect to video and/or audio data, transcoding generally involves changing the encoding format of encoded video and/or audio data. For example, transcoding may involve changing the type of encoding applied to such data, and/or changing the resolution or fidelity of such data. In some cases, transcoding tasks may involve a series of operations, where particular operations within the series are performed by different processing engines. Moreover, different types of transcoding tasks may make differing demands on the processing engines of a transcoding system. In a cloud-based transcoding environment, a transcoding management node may receive transcoding tasks and distribute them to various transcoding nodes. The efficiency of each transcoding node in the transcoding system may depend on the extent to which the utilization of the processing engines therein is maximized.